Talk:List of proposed language families

superfamilies and subfamilies

The Indo-European section lists branches within IE that are thought by some to be more closely related to each other than to other branches, while (as far as I can tell) all the other sections concern groupings for which no kinship is generally accepted. That difference ought to be mentioned somewhere. —Tamfang (talk) 23:43, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

So I separated them. —Tamfang (talk) 15:56, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Does Indo-Hittite belong on the list? All other entries are controversial lumps and this one is a controversial split; though it can be seen as a lumping of all IE branches except Anatolian. —Tamfang (talk) 15:56, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Validity for Uralo-Siberian?

Several months ago while looking at a video of its uploader creating a fleshed-out version of Vostyach similar to DJP's fleshing out of the Game of Thrones and Dune languages, I said this: "I heard that Uralo-Siberian is controversial, but I never looked into why. Could it be like Proto-World and Altaic? Is Michael Fortescue(and maybe Diego Marani) anything like G.J. Ramstedt, Nicholas Poppe, Joseph Greenberg, Merritt Ruhlen, Oleg Mudrak, Sergei Starostin, and even Anna Dybo? Is Fortescue a long-ranger fishing for resemblances between words of different languages/protolangs where properly-sharpened minds see differences in complex histories?"

A few weeks ago, someone named Sophia Schlier-Hanson replied: "Some long rangers are fringier than others. Ruhlen and Bengtson do nothing BUT their thing— collecting dictionary words that kind of look similar and arbitrarily making up a word that kind of sounds like all of them, a far MORE primitive and amateurish than the approaches 18th century philologists who first noticed pan-IE cognates were using. Greenberg is a decently well respected Africanist who HAS successfully identified some large, very old families on JUST the right side of max time depth for the comparative method, but in his old age he got cocky and got in with Ruhlen and Bengtson for some reason. Starostin overextended the comparative method a few millennia past its usual limit, did all his work with midcentury through ‘80s reconstructions which are now badly dated, and doesn’t do well at filtering out loanwords, but he WAS the first to attempt comparative method reconstructions of several Siberian indigenous language groups and his work is close enough to methodological respectability to be okay for plausible, consistent diachronic conlanging if not actual academic work building on it. Fortescue, about whom you are asking, is an actual Siberianist who from everything I’ve seen uses perfectly solid methodology, iirc has published a couple etymological dictionaries that were first of their kind, and is one of the foremost experts on some of the languages he’s studied."

I thanked her, and she responded: "You're welcome! I actually quite like Fortescue (and Vajda, the other big name in Pacific Rim historical linguistics, a rather niche special interest of mine). Happy researching/ conlanging! :D"

I would look up the Uralo-Siberian article on Wikipedia, and the preface says it is "considered a fringe theory by linguists" and "utilizes mass comparison", though those pieces of information lack citations. Whoever decided to put those in the article... where did they even get those ideas? As in, where is the evidence to prove it? Which well-ranked linguistics(Campbell, Nichols, Georg, the late Vovin, etc.) are against the hypothesis?

I would ask people on Reddit, and they told me about Georg writing a review a few decades ago for "Language Relations Across the Bearing Strait". https://www.jstor.org/stable/30028571 This information could help out, though it might be outdated. Kaden Bayne Vanciel (talk) 02:39, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

What makes a proposed language family "widely rejected"?

There are two lists in this article, one for proposals that are "under consideration" and another for proposals that are "widely rejected". The problem is that there isn't a clear way to separate the two. While there are proposals in the "widely rejected" list that are most definitely universally panned (Proto-World, Borean, etc), there are also proposals in the list that share a similar status to those in the "under consideration" list. How is it decided which list a proposal goes in, and should the separation of these lists even exist? – Treetoes023 (talk) 13:39, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Which "widely rejected" family do you believe the wider linguistics community isn't widely rejecting, specifically? The answer to your question will vary a lot depending on that. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 15:39, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Two examples for misclassified groups are Bengtson's version of Austric, which is listed as "under consideration", but which is actually below the standards of Elamo-Dravidian or Altaic. And Macro-Mayan, which counts as "widely rejected" only if judged by McQuown's version of the hypothesis. This century has seen two interlocking new hypotheses, "Totozoquean" and "Mayan-Mijesokean" that are literally "under consideration": Campbell finds Mayan-Mijesokean promising, and Mora-Marín, the proponent of Mayan-Mijesokean, does not outright exclude the possibility that Totonacan is related to Mayan-Mijesokean.

I see another issue with the inclusion of some proposals that might produce undue weight. "Sino-Uralic" is a one-man hypothesis that is heavily promoted via Wikipedia. "Miao–Dai" also is a one-time proposal (which at least hasn't been boosted with a stand-alone article) that has rarely been cited and in fact has not been evaluated at all yet.

Also, there are dozens of developing hypotheses for languages of the Amazonian and Papuan areas; we should probably list them separately, as they are the true trailblazers in current historical linguistics, and the total opposite of worn-out hypotheses like Nostratic: lots of data but few to no promising comparanda in the latter, little data but very promising resemblance sets with initial attempts steps towards establishing regular sound correspondences in the former (e.g. Greater West Bobmberai).

Finally, at least two proposals stand out as well-received by specialists in the respective fields, viz. Yuki-Wappo and Austro-Tai. Much of the resistance to Austro-Tai was at the time when Paul Benedict built his case for it by burying the good cognates with bad cognates at a ratio of 1:10. –Austronesier (talk) 16:38, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

@Warrenmck: Austronesier pretty much said everything I would've said (and added more I hadn't even thought of). – Treetoes023 (talk) 15:39, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

I think these ones are too out of my wheelhouse to actually have an informed/coherent opinion on, so I think I need to leave you guys to it! Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 15:46, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

@Warrenmck and Austronesier: Okay, this leaves us back where we started though. Do we keep the "widely rejected" list or do we merge it with the "under consideration" list? – Treetoes023 (talk) 16:36, 2 July 2024 (UTC)